I’ve been working this weekend on creating TMC (Tag My City) events’ calendar. I’ve already finished the prototype and both Callie and Cade seem to like it.

The production version of the calendar will have event’s name, date, time, address, description, category, tags and access level (public or private). It will also have links to the place of the event and to all the users attending that event.

The calendar can be filtered by date, category, city, place(restaurant, university, etc.) or user

Oh I almost forgot, TMC calendar is compliant with hCalendar

We are still planning on launching the beta version of TMC (www.tagmycity.com) on August 31 without making changes to the project scope…. not yet ;)

Most of rails adopters have been busy upgrading their rails due to the discovered security risk. If you have not upgraded yet then you should do it now… seriously right now. The security problem seemed to be very nasty to the point that the Ruby on Rails core team didn’t want to discuss it publicly.

Of course as soon as I knew about the issue yesterday, I upgraded all my servers to Rails 1.1.5.
it turns out that the rush released Rails 1.1.5 didn�t actually solve the problem and there was another problem in rails routing inside app/config/routes.rb. So I had to do some changes manually to fix this issue…Well I just got notified that there is another release Rails 1.1.6 that it’s ready for upgrade.

I know that a lot of people are angry right now, I understand where they are coming from but this is something to expect from young products with fast development cycles like Rails. However, I think the rails team should apply more testing and QA practices to insure the quality of Rails. I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from FreeBSD and the way they control the security of their code.

I hope this security problem is not going to turn off people from adopting rails.

gotta go to upgrade..

Tag My City(TMC) team has been updating the website�s XHTML/CSS to be Microformats compliant.
By adopting Microforamts, TMC�s public information will be more accessible on the web.
In addition, events calendar and contacts information can be integrated and reused easily between different applications. For example; you could automatically synchronize your cellphone or desktop calendar with TMC events calendar. And you can add restaurants� contact information to your address book with a click of a button.

Background information

Web content is usually created for human consumption without paying attention to machine readability making it difficult to provide elegant solutions to information retrieval and data integration.

This problem is what�s known as transforming data into information. Most solutions propose adding metadata(description) to data to give it meaning, thus to make it understandable by machines.

Semantic Web encourages using standardized vocabularies to describe data. As the name implies, standardized vocabularies are standard keywords or tags that describe data.

Microformats provide powerful yet simple sets of data formats that can be simply added to web content to make it both readable by humans and machines.
These sets are growing very fast to cover most forms of data e.g. contacts, reviews, events, resumes, listings, tags, etc.

Using Microformats is very easy. For example if you want to present a user name in your web content then you use the standard tags to describe both first name and last name. Let�s say �fn??? means full name. Now you can add �fn??? to your XHTML


<span class=???vcard???> <span class=???fn???>Kinan Sweidan</span></span>


When a machine reads �vcard??? it understands that the tag contains contact information. Similarly when it reads �fn?, it understands that �fn? means full name.

This approach is very powerful because it allows accurate information retrieval. Let�s say I want to look up reviews for �McDonalds??? by �Bill Clinton?, the machine (in this case the search engine) will try to deliver accurate information by searching metadata (for example �fn? and �hreview?) combined with my keywords (�Bill Clinton? and �McDonalds???)

Microformats make data integration much easier allowing different applications to exchange and reuse data.

Rails is celebrating its second birthday. If you like object oriented languages, you value open source, and you are getting tired of web development complexity, then Rails is the perfect solution for you.

Rails is not a programming language, it’s more like a framework. For Java/J2EE programmers RoR(Ruby on Rails) is Struts + Hibernate + Xerces + Axis. etc. Where Ruby is the actual programming language (like Java).

Unlike PHP, RoR uses MVC (Model – View – Controller) and Active Record design patterns making it cleaner and more organized than PHP.

From entrepreneurs point of view, rails is the perfect implementation framework for web applications. Using rails will allow you to lower your cost and improve your productivity. Web development projects can now be implemented in a more efficient way eliminating the need for VC(Venture Capital) investments.

Do you feel the rails fever? Start here

It seems like everywhere I go these days, I find an ad for the “new” Verizon Chocolate phone. Verizon claims that this phone is a serious contender to the Apple iPod and it’s going to take some of Apple’s market share.

This ad made me so frustrated with the desperate attitude of some companies to gain market lead without coming up with real innovative designs . They spend their money on marketing campaigns rather on research and development. They copy other companies ideas and then try to challenge them.

I am sorry Verizon but your phone looks like a cheap replica of iPod. I am sure it’s going to make a big success in China Town black market..

IBM developer works is my favorite website for Java/J2EE daily reading. The website contains good technical articles for Java developers covering wide range of topics such as Java, J2EE, database, SOA and more..

I’ve been noticing that PHP is making it’s way to developerWorks website…

Would IBM consider PHP as Java replacement?

There are rumors that some VPs at IBM think that Java is too complicated and there is a need to be replaced by a simpler language such as PHP..
I personally don’t think these rumors are true because PHP can’t replace Java in IBM products since IBM supports a lot of legacy applications where Java is more suited for integrating heterogeneous systems than PHP.

In addition, IBM considers WebSphere products and SOA tools as their most profitable projects and they are entirely written in Java.

How could IBM use PHP?

As IBM tries to take a bigger share in the small business market which is mostly claimed by Microsoft they are focusing more on offering open source software such as WebSphere Application Server Community Edditon which is built on Apache Geronimo and Cloudscape which is built on Apache Derby

Giving free software to small businesses certainly help but that’s only part of the problem. The biggest problem of using Java in small environment is overcoming Java complexity. Java is very complicated compared to newer languages such as PHP and Ruby on Rails. I am not trying to make a point on which one is better in general but it’s no brainer that PHP is much cheaper to implement than Java specially for small web application.

IBM has already noticed the popularity of PHP among open source programmers. It would be very wise if IBM finds a place for PHP in their small business products domain. IBM is already talking about offering Wikis for the enterprise so why not use PHP especially that the most popular Wiki is built with PHP..

As for me I’ve chosen Java and Ruby on Rails as my favorite languages … sorry PHP :)

Sun says the question is not if it will open source Java, but how

At JavaOne in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, the company’s new executive vice president of software, officially announced that Java will become open source. Green encouraged the Java community to participate in the process. watch the video